World War II Fighter Planes

You are the Head Researcher working on improving the survival rate* of the WW2 Alliance Force's fighter planes.

In those days, fighter planes are on single propeller engines. Your task is to collect statistics on the number of bullet holes on fighter planes that just returned from their missions, and use this statistics as a basis to recommend improvement to the design of the fighter planes.

After studying 10,000 planes that returned from the battle field, you discovered that A)60% of the bullet holes are found at the wings of the airplane, B)39% around the cockpit area and only C)1% on the engine area.

Your immediate duty is to use this information to recommend which area (A, B or C) to increase armor plating. You could only increase the armor plating on 1 area instead of all because additional armor plating affects the agility of the fighter plane.

Justify your rationale for your choice of section (linking to the % of bullet holes found).

* Survival rate is determined by whether the plane return safely to ground.

Hint

Answer

Section C - the engine area.

On the surface, the engine area seemingly received the least bullet hits (1%) and should not be warranted additional protection. However, this is not true because majority of planes that suffered engine hits have not survived to return from battleground. So there are very few planes contributing to the count on engine hits. On the other hand, the fact that there are many hits on wings and cockpit area and yet many of these planes still returned safely show that these 2 areas are not the most critical area.

Since you could only add armor plate to 1 area - increasing armor plating to the engine area will be most viable in improving the survival rate of the planes.Hide